The Devil's Details (7 page)

As a picaresque hero, the footnote was fortunate to have Bayle for its first important tutor; to learn how to be dramatic, even histrionic, is not a laughable lesson. Something deeper goes on in the
Dictionary, Historical and Critical
, however, which best can be discovered by extending our analogy. The picaresque hero's personality is protean; he can be anything. Over the course of his life, his characteristics are “a servant, an altar boy, a beggar's boy, a constable's man, a water-seller, a wine seller, a town crier ….”
³⁵
And also a blind man, a mouse, and a snake! Another is “a mariner, a miller, a baker, a scout, a crosse-biter [an upright man], a cheater, a cozener, a fox ….”
³⁶
The picaresque hero is the embodiment of a primitive Id—not the one Freud found in his sophisticated, Vienna version of the unconscious, with its Ego and Super Ego that internalize law and order, but a pre-Freudian Id. Yes, this is an Id that always requires an external control, a hierarchy of class and status, a constabulary, draconian courts, punishment made visible by the feet and arms sticking out of stocks, the scars from whips and branding irons, the necks dangling from ropes.

The seventeenth century remains the perfect place for such a hero, a world always on the brink of chaos, where our footnote, trained by Bayle, becomes a survivor in a dark, swirling, sometimes upside-down, sometimes inside-out story. Bayle's footnotes are emotional, dramatic, protean characters that put to shame the pallid caricatures to which later scholars sometimes reduced them.

Their next important tutor, Edward Gibbon, did not greet them at the door with a hearty embrace and lead them into the dining room for a meal of roast beef and port. Though Gibbon inherited property, occasionally played the role of country squire, and was afflicted by gout, probably from an overabundance of wine and kidney pie, he was not the horse-riding, hale, red-faced English gentleman Thackeray and a score of other gossips might have led us to expect. No, he was a short, dumpy, indoor man. “I never handled a gun,” he confessed, “I seldom mounted a horse, and my walks were soon terminated by some shady bench of philosophic contemplation.”
³⁷
A man who never in his life purchased a fowling piece but who once brought home 150 writing pens, “100 of them large,”
³⁸
would not fit the stereotype even had he stayed in England instead of running off to France or Switzerland at every excuse. As he grew older, “his tailor's bills constantly in-clude[ d] charges for remaking and enlarging garments.”
³⁹
A certain Madame du Deffand, a blind aristocrat in the habit of acquiring familiarity with a new acquaintance by stroking the face with her fingers, did so to Gibbon. She was not pleased. The face, “obscured by fat,” convinced her that a witless joke had been played on her and “the behind of a naked baby” had been presented to her.
⁴⁰

In the beginning Gibbon did not fight for footnotes; he let his publisher stick the commentary and references into the back of the book. Apparently it was David Hume, the skeptical philosopher, who drew Gibbon's attention to the importance of the placement of notes. When the first volume of
The History
appeared, its notes in the back, Hume reacted immediately. “One is … plagued with his Notes,” he wrote Gibbon's publisher—who happened also to be Hume's—“according to the present Method of printing the Book: When a note is announced, you turn to the End of the Volume; and there you often find nothing but the Reference to an Authority: All these Authorities ought only to be printed at the Margin or the Bottom of the Page.”
⁴¹
Hume's advice stimulated Gibbon; it did not guide him. Gibbon made no use of the margins for his notes in future volumes, nor did he leave his commentary to languish in the back of the book, bringing only the references (as Hume suggested) to the bottom of the page. Every note became a footnote; and we should first celebrate and then explain his perfect judgment. We need to get into Gibbon's head. In doing so we cannot avoid speculation simply from fear of embarrassing ourselves in front of Clio.

Gibbon was an English parliamentarian. He took his seat at a time when the first substantial threat to the British Empire was rolling in from the American colonies. Tea was dumped; Concord was marched toward and retreated from; General Washington rowed as quietly as he could across the Delaware: all of that during the days Gibbon listened to the back and forth of debate, the verbal cut and thrust of master politicians, the hems and haws of the timid, the catcalls and catty whispers of the backbenchers. The first volume of
The History
came out in 1776, and soon after came Hume's suggestion. Surely Gibbon, reminded of the possibilities of footnotes, was influenced by the temper of the times and the seating arrangements of the Parliament. We can let Gibbon think of his text as a prime minister's oration without too much stretching of the facts. He certainly would not want his notes to remain backbenchers; nor would he want them to be leaning over into the face of the orator, as they would be were the notes to be placed in the page margins. They needed to be at the bottom of the page. There they occupy the contradictory place of the leaders of the opposition: at a distance but close at hand. Someone once said that notes ran along the bottom of Gibbon's pages like dogs yapping at the text;
*
a more accurate depiction would have them leaping up like offended opposition leaders objecting or quibbling or dragging the debate off in a new direction.

Gibbon knew that it was the comments and not just the dry facts that enlivened parliamentary debate and persuaded the doubtful. His genius is never more evident than when he refuses to follow Hume toward a footnote of crabbed scholarship, and instead lets the footnote remain fulsome and varied and human. To know Gibbon's footnotes is to know Gibbon, the man.

He was a man of inexhaustible curiosity. When his text arrives at Commodus's rule, it has plenty to say about that cruel and strange emperor; and Gibbon makes sure to use the goings on in the amphitheater to exhibit Commodus's dreadful taste for the slaughter of people and animals. A panther is dropped by a well-placed arrow before a cheering crowd, elephants, rhinoceros, a hundred lions. But when Commodus cuts “asunder the long bony neck of the ostrich …,”
⁴²
Gibbon can't leave it at that. The reader, he assumes, is as desirous as himself for details. “The ostrich's neck is three feet long, and composed of seventeen vertebrae ….”
⁴³
Not just a fox or a pheasant has been killed but a splendid oddity. Gibbon knows his compatriots. Beasts seen by Englishmen only in works of art or in their “fancy,” he emphasizes. The giraffe is one such animal; Gibbon makes sure we know the giraffe is “the tallest, the most gentle, and the most useless of the large quadrupeds.” Again the details: “… a native only of the interior parts of Africa, [it] has not been seen in Europe since the revival of letters, and though M. de Buffon … has endeavored to describe, he has not ventured to delineate, the giraffe.”
⁴⁴
But much more is going on in this note than the supplying of details. Under cover of adding information, Gibbon is rendering a judgment. The description “tallest,” “gentle,” and “most useless” turns the fabled giraffe into an eccentric aunt whose visits to the house are as pleasant as they are rare; Commodus has been turned into a contemptible bully-as well as a murderer.

Gibbon's “facts” often fly as swiftly and deadly as Commodus's arrows. When his text awhile later wanders into a discussion of the origins of English words, he uses a footnote to settle an old score. “Dr. Johnson affirms that
few
English words are of British extraction. Mr. Whitaker, who understands the British language, has discovered more than
three thousand
, and actually produces a long and various catalogue ….”
⁴⁵
The quiet, invidious comparison of the tic-afflicted dictionary maker who “affirms” an error with Mr. Whitaker who “understands” the language is a fine example of speech as a whip that members of Parliament employed time and again. The italicizing of “
few
” and “
three thousand
” are the raised eyebrows of an experienced orator making sure his colleagues appreciate his point. Making the reader aware of a catalog is rubbing it in, but then Dr. Johnson was not known for his tact or his restraint either.
*

The eighteenth century was an age of specialists if we judge it by its criminal class, which was made up of subdivision after subdivision of minute distinctions between different kinds of thieves and con men. But the literati were an exception. They refused specialization. A historian like Gibbon felt he had as much right to lay down the law about derivations as about the succession of royalty; he pronounced with equal confidence on military strategy and on an ostrich's anatomy. Footnotes encouraged this expansiveness; the bottom of the page becomes a long, winding corridor where the scholar pops out of his office to stretch his legs and, meeting colleagues, gossips, tells jokes, rants about politics and society, and feels free to offer opinions based on nothing but his prejudices and whims. In this corridor the scholar becomes autodidact.

Gibbon himself opens the door and critiques Petrarch's verse: “He spins this allegory beyond all measure or patience.”
⁴⁶
And as poets are on his mind, Gibbon doesn't hesitate to spout off about one of his pet peeves, the office of poet laureate; he mutters about how poets often have been “false and venal” and then sputters “but I much doubt whether any age or court can produce a similar establishment of a stipendiary
[sic]
poet who in every reign and at all events, is bound to furnish twice a year a measure of praise and verse, such as may be sung in the chapel, and, I believe, in the presence of the sovereign.”
⁴⁷
To this point, the note might seem the casual aside a scholar makes to a colleague; however, Gibbon keeps the model of parliamentary oratory even when speaking in private. The personal is always political; the political always personal. So Gibbon clears his throat and continues. “I speak the more freely,” he says, and we should imagine him bowing his head to the opposition humbly, “as the best time for abolishing this ridiculous custom is while the prince is a man of virtue and the poet a man of genius.”
⁴⁸
With this gracious
and
calculated compliment, Gibbon keeps the king and the poet laureate on his side of the aisle.

Gibbon took the picaresque footnote in hand and, without entirely breaking its spirit, put it into a suit. Under his tutelage, footnotes became trustworthy. They made pleasant dining companions. Their conversation is full of carefully balanced sentences and sudden quips, and they can be relied upon to use their napkins. Still, they remain various and filled with the unexpected, but also always with a public face. They are politicians even in the drawing room. To bring this home requires a digression of some length.
*

Gibbon never cut a dashing figure in the eyes of the opposite sex and, in fact, suffered one disappointment after another. One of those disappointments cast a shadow over his entire life, affecting even his footnotes. The affair began simply enough in Switzerland when the twenty-year-old Gibbon met another twenty-year-old, Mademoiselle Curchod, a blond, blue-eyed “belle of Lausanne,”
⁴⁹
coquettish
and
well read; it progressed when Suzanne, looking past the short and unprepossessing first impression of a mediocre dancer, saw a “physiognomy so extraordinary that one does not tire of examining it, of painting it, of copying it”;
⁵⁰
Gibbon, screwing up his courage, went off to England to tell his hardheaded father his son intended to marry a foreigner with no dowry and no prospects who had no intention of leaving her Switzerland after marriage. The affair came to an end with the young Gibbon dithering in England and Suzanne flirting with other men in Lausanne.
⁵¹

Or rather, as is the case with so many early loves, it never really ended. Suzanne went on to become the wife of the formidable Jacques Necker, Swiss banker, Louis the Sixteenth's director general of finances and minister of state, and casualty of the French Revolution. A writer herself, she founded one of the first of the famous Parisian literary salons; her daughter became the extraordinary Madame de Staël, wit, novelist, and social historian. Gibbon became a member of Parliament, won European fame as the author of
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and settled into an unwanted and uncomfortable bachelorhood. They saw little of each other for a time.

No matter. When the first volume of
Decline and Fall
appears, Madame Necker scoops it up (presumably before it was translated into French). A letter from her soon arrives at Gibbon's London address filled with arguments and inducements for Gibbon to visit Paris and larded with thoughtful praise of his history. He has “immense erudition,” she tells him, profound and precise “knowledge of men and humanity, of nations and individuals,” and “a fertile and sensitive imagination.”
⁵²
She compares him to Tacitus, only in order to dismiss the Roman historian. “Only philosophers read Tacitus, you will be read by everyone ….” And then comes praise that, while couched as a general statement, subtly reveals a critic who once was in love: “… we shall learn to think while believing that we are only seeing and feeling.”
⁵³
Necker's response to the mature Gibbon's work usefully characterizes his prose but surely is also the response of a lover. The heightened alertness of the senses that accompanies love, and particularly first love, does often seem to become a way of knowing: Madame is visceral; her response is that of a woman remembering love. Gibbon had some intimations of this, for he “reread a hundred times” her “charming letter.”
⁵⁴
And he did make his way to Paris and her salon.